Friday, September 22, 2017

A first step to levelling the playing field from centuries of colonialism...Justin Trudeau at the U.N

Prime Minister Trudeau hit a home run in the General
Assembly earlier this week with his historic speech of atonement for the
century-plus abuses of colonialism against the indigenous people of Canada. Of
course, words alone will not bring a full measure of justice for the
innumerable wrongs First Nations people have, are and will continue to endure.
However, to take the podium in New York and to acknowledge the black hole that
is Canada’s history on this file, and to risk the derision, scorn, jealousy and
even contempt of world leaders and the home media suggests that the man is
growing into the potential of his elected office.

As he correctly and appropriately pointed out in his
address, this is not merely about righting those deplorable wrongs in Canada;
it is also about focusing the world’s attention on the serious power abuses
that are intrinsic to colonialism, a pattern and a history that is endemic to
empires, dominions, satellite clusters of countries and the proposition that
dictators can dictate the lives of people in their sphere of influence.

Whether colonialism is at the root of political empire
building, or corporate aggrandizement, or religious dogma and domination, or
financial buy-outs and mergers in which the most powerful take control of the
playing field regardless of whether they offer the most effective, the
best-designed and built, the most efficient or the most ethical products or
services, top-down hierarchies that are indigenous to colonialism, like
behemoths, proliferate the planet.

In the Canadian context, for a government, after 150
years of insouciant racism and avoidance of responsibility for the lives of the
original people (who claim to have been here
for 15,000 years), to take the first step in a long-overdue journey is
not only a monumental shift in national priorities; it is also so complex and
encumbered a prospect that it will not be completed in the life of the current
federal government, nor in the life of succeeding governments for the next
century.

Clean drinking and bathing water inside safe and
hygenic housing, safe and competent schools, access to effective health care
and most importantly work with dignity…these are achieveable and measureable
targets, dependent only on the vision, the will and the commitment of national
leaders, in collaboration with indigenous bands and their respective leaders. A
system of indigenous justice, designed and implemented by indigenous elders,
along with the national observance of land treaties, and the implementation of
those clauses that require shared planning, shared design and shared
compensation from natural resource extraction, refining and distribution
projects. Individual human rights and dignity, along with a profound respect
for the environment (land, air, water) as honoured by indigenous people are all
potential gifts from that community to the broader national community. And the
sooner the national consciousness embraces this reality, the more healthy will
be the lives of all Canadians.

And then, on the world stage, there is no country on
the planet that has not, and does not still have to face a colonial history,
with the so-called major players in North America and Europe being the
originators and the sustainers of colonialism while many of the countries in
the developing world are still struggling to get out from under the binding
ropes and chains of their colonial masters. And the implications of this power
imbalance continue to plague the world community, from processes that would
acknowledge the monstrous effluent being emitted by developed countries and
their corporation and the legitimate demand that those countries offset the
costs of pollution control in the developing world, to the deplorable imbalance
in arms production, sales, proliferation and the political implications of that
implicit and “imposed” injustice.

It is not only individual human rights that the world
community has to protect; it is also the national and tribal rights of
indigenous peoples everywhere that have to be factored into the collective
decision-making, process-design and collaborative execution on the large and
threatening issues we face: the environment, the drug crisis, the military arms
race, the economic divide within developed countries and between the developed
world and the developing world.

Trudeau is positing a very different way of perceiving
and hence of dealing with minorities, especially those minorities who have
suffered, endured and suffered some more at the “hands” of the rich and the
powerful. Imagine if the Trudeau theme had been emitted from the mouth of the
American president, about indigenous peoples in Dakota and in New Mexico, and
about African-Americans and Latinos. Imagine the degree of integrity and
humility, the historic level, that would have been trumpeted by the U.S. media,
if such an address had come from trump rather than the name-calling, bullying
drivel that we all heard.

Although the Canadian leader has perched himself and
his government on a very high and slender branch of a very brittle tree, a
branch that reporters and pundits will be gleefully trying to break from the
trunk of the tree. There is nothing more seductive to a journalist that the
prospect of bringing a high-wire rock-star politician down from his precarious
perch. And already, the National Post, in headlining all those topics not
covered by the speech, and the CBC’s At Issue Panel, in pejoratively dubbing
the speech “lobbying for that seat on the Security Council (Andrew Coyne) and
castigating it for failing to address all the ‘hot-button’ issues of the day
like North Korea, Putin, Syria, refugees and cyber-security (Althea Raj of
Huffington Post).

If there ever were a time when the length and breadth
of vision of both political leaders and reporters/editorialists needed to be
raised off the floor of the mud-wrestling ring in which both Kim and trump are
wallowing, it is now. And for Trudeau to deliver a speech that positions
Canada, and the Canadian people, squarely in the world’s headlight, as a
counterpoint to the racist, sexist, homophobic climate denier now occupying the
Oval Office (just a side-bar of accomplishment for the Trudeau address),
demonstrates that he may actually be starting to fill his father’s shoes, and
the inflated shirt he has worn since romping out onto the political stage as a
candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Individual minority rights, while laudable and worthy
of legal protection (in individual cases) will struggle for their rightful and
respected place on the public agenda so long as minorities everywhere shoulder
the mantle of “inferiority” (no matter how that badge is perceived).

So many different iterations of colonialism pervade
the global culture:

·Workers
without labour rights and the organizations to advocate for their pay with
dignity, their safety and security, their pensions and their access to health
care are living a form of colonialism.

·Even
labour unions themselves are guilty of practicing a kind of reverse
“colonialism” given their relentless, and now toothless, pursuit of new
members, and their demeaning of employers who block union certification votes.

·Small
town politics and the players on that state continue to defer to the “founding
families” or the most affluent, or the most “connected” in their granting of
zoning amendments, building permits, disharges from minor offenses, street
repairs, the restoration of services following a disaster like a hurricane, a
large fire or an ice storm.

· School boards, both public and private, as
well as colleges and universities, whenever they can, defer to their own
graduates when making staffing appointments, as if there were some “privilege”
attached to “local” graduates, when we all know that new ideas, new
perspectives and new ways of doing things will more likely assure the growth
and evolution of the organizations. This is especially true when making
appointments at the senior administrative level, thereby ensuring a narrowing
and parochial approach, as compared with the promise of innovation.

·Towns
and cities, when prompted to ask neighbouring centres for some practical advice
on files both are facing, will too often categorically refuse, preferring
“local” approaches simply because they are local, and not because they are more
effective. *

·Ask
anyone who has spent their school years moving from school to school, as part
of their following their parents for whatever reason. So lonely and so isolated
are most, and they have been for decades, that recently in Florida, one
“outsider” student has implemented a welcoming program for new students. He has
gathered some who see the wisdom and the compassion in his idea, and they now
eat lunch, approach and welcome newcomers to their school as an act of student
“citizenship”.

·Watch
the lethargic and almost relentlessly blocked integration of immigrants,
refugees, and newcomers to most towns and cities, (or the reverse, a smothering
of uber-“care” that leaves them no room to breathe) and the impediments to a
successful orientation program for sponsors that takes place in many
“welcoming” communities.

From a variety of
perspectives, we are all living, simultaneously, on both sides of the colonial
moat. We are, at one and the same time, dominant in parts of our lives and
recessive and submissive in other parts. And the “divide” keeps us vacillating
between feeling confident and feeling quite insecure. Whether the divide is
generated by a physical symptom, a racial difference, an income divide, a
linguistic divide (even one so mundane as a grammar divide), even a voice
volume and enthusiasm divide will find some being rejected in select
“fraternities” or “sororities.” In many North American towns and cities, there
is a religious colonialism, pitting protestants against Catholics, Muslims
against Jews, white supremacists against blacks, Jews and immigrants of all
varieties.

The first and requisite
act of levelling the playing field, after decades, or centuries of forcing it
to favour the “dominant” agent is to acknowledge the pattern, the participation
in the pattern and history of dominance, and to begin to “listen” (really
listen) to the legitimate needs of the “colony” with a view to searching not
merely for short-term accommodation but for long term and permanent
reconciliation. And that process, regardless of where it begins, will
inevitably take decades, if not longer.

Trudeau’s first, bold and
courageous step this week offers a model for other agents who dominated and
controlled the colonial world to begin to thaw their hardened and potentially
arrogant arteries, let the gagged voices free, and begin a process, not of
lip-service, but of real and authentic accommodation and collaboration. A
process of reconciliation whose vibrations, like the rock tossed into the pool,
can stretch out to the very edges of the world’s communal pool, and transform a
world in which antagonisms, hatreds, feuds, and conflicts dominate to one in
which processes that offer alternative dispute mechanisms can and will be
learned, practiced, applied and continuing revised and researched.

The October 2017 edition
of Reader’s Digest contains a quote from the first Jewish woman to sit on the
Supreme Court of Canada (appointed in 2004), Justice Rosalie Abella, with which
Trudeau would clearly concur, and with which the world’s highest ideals and aspirations
comport:

These words are taken from a speech
Madame Justice Abella delivered at Brandeis University:

“It is time to remind ourselves why
we developed such a passionate and, we thought, unshakable commitment to
democracy and human rights, to remember the three lessons we were supposed to
have learned from the concentration camps of Europe: indifference is
injustice’s incubator; it’s not just what you stand for, it’s what you stand up
for; and we can never forget how the world looks to those who are vulnerable.”

*This scribe made a presentation of
an original design of a “career retrofit” for unemployed tech workers in Ottawa
early in this century. The program was designed in North Bay, some four hours
to the north west of Canada’s capital. The first and most prominent question we
faced in our presentation, so indelibly is it engraved on my memory was, “So
why should a program from North Bay be implemented here and not one designed in
Ottawa?” There were no reflections, questions or even criticism of the details
of our design, just a rejection out of hand, because it did not originate in
Ottawa.